


Without

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, merry christmas guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:22:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21958072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: That's the strange thing about being born with half a soul, Ben Solo learns: you miss a thing that is not yours yet.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 18
Kudos: 160





	Without

_…_

He feels it only when everything else around him and within him is quiet, tranquil and steadied, and therefore it does not come to him very often.

Ben feels it, for instance, on Mek’tradi, when he watches a dragonfly alight atop the translucent skin of calm morning water on a lake. He feels it while standing beneath a great rose window in the Senate House on Hosnian Prime, holding out his open palms as if in petition to see them checked with the white sunshine changed to greens and golds by the window’s colored glass. It comes to him when his father cards a hand through his hair, in passing, when he stands on his toes to receive one of his mother’s embraces, when he watches a polar star appear in the night sky above Corellia.

Each time is the same; the central music of it rings clear and loud through an empty place that has been hollowed out somewhere deep inside him, and it lays a longing like homesickness onto his heart so that there are occasionally unsearchable tears in his eyes when the feeling leaves him.

He understands what such things mean, of course.

“They don’t say it,” Ben begins, seated at the edge of his bed; his legs are still short enough that his toes do not brush the floor while he swings a foot back and forth. “They know it, though. Mom pretends she doesn’t. But she knows I’m –” he stitches his lips together to stop their silly trembling “—I’m not the way I’m supposed to be.”

Ben must close his eyes, so he can concentrate enough to hear his answer, although in about a year’s time he will not need to because the voice will be louder.

No, it speaks. This is not what you were made for.

“I know,” Ben says. “Can you show me?”

Oh, yes.

And when the feeling at last stops finding him, somewhere between age ten and eleven, Ben takes it as a rite of passage. It is the necessary end of unfounded belief and of the misplaced, penny-match faith he used to strike against the darkness, an end of the innocent sanctity that may be found in silence. 

Good, he thinks. Good.

…

“—Wait, hang on.” Rey reaches out a hand to detain him. “Keep still a minute. You’ve got something –”

Ben hunches his shoulder within her reach. Rey slips two purposeful fingers under his collar and plucks a single long, silver-gray hair from the fabric; Ben has already yanked several of the sneaky little bastards from his comb and he retrieves this one with the adroitness of a street magician palming a coin. 

Rey lifts an eyebrow.

“And what was that for, Master Solo?”

“Confiscation of evidence, Master Solo,” Ben reports. “I can’t have you realizing you’ve married an old man.”

“Oh, bosh. I think you’re just looking for an excuse to be cantankerous.” Rey crinkles her nose as she teases at another lock of hair above his ear. “I’ve told you before, ten years’ difference isn’t that long.”

Ben knows she does not really mean this. He has helped Rey sift sand away from a rust-withered AT-AT in the Jakku wastes and gone on his knees through a passageway that opens into the room where she waited nearly all her life; he has stared at the walls covered in scratch-marks so regular and precise they resemble the cryptographs of a dead religion.

He puts his hand over hers. It presses Rey’s fingers against the pulse at his temple.

“No,” he says. “But it’s long enough.”

…


End file.
